Photoshop Magic

This was more work than you could ever imagine. The sky, bluffs, and road were all edited separately.

One of my first attempts at cloning, probably about four years ago.  Check out the backgrounds.

Dreaming of YouTube

A friend of mine runs a YouTube channel that is wildly popular with youngsters interested in learning origami, how to solve a Rubik's cube, or seeing his cat chase around a laser pointer.  YouTube basically consumes a good chunk of the time not devoted to dental school.  I decided to have a little photoshop fun with one of the pictures I found on Rob's phone.  

Tidbits of Life

I got a call from my mom on the 4th telling me that my grandmother had died. Over the weekend, my dad sent me an email with the obituary and some photos. I found the above portrait to be just stunning, however it was in desperate need of some help. It had been scanned in at a low resolution, and never properly processed afterwards. There was dust evident, not to mention the desperate need for some color correction. And just to prove how picky I am about photography, I took issue with some of the shadows. I opened up photoshop earlier tonight and spent about a half an hour cleaning the picture up. I'm so pleased with the result, I thought I'd post it here. Blogger seems to have butchered the photo, though.


I did actually make it out to Montana for the funeral. It was really great to see the family, even though the circumstances weren't the best. I decided to try and make the best of the situation, surprising everyone by making it to Billings. I ended up getting to spend an extra day with my Grandpa when my flight back to Philly was canceled due to the 'Snowpocalapse' as it is being called on the east coast. I have seriously never seen so much snow. Ever. Check out what the car looked like, even after a day of melt.


In other news, Angels & Airwaves released their third (and hopefully not last) album, LOVE, over the weekend. It's a free download. I think it is definitely worth your time to do so. On some of the tracks, their sound has changed a bit going back to the Blink-182 roots, but on a majority of the album, they sound very much the same. I like the songs Shove, Hallucinations, The Moon-Atomic, Clever Love (which is perhaps my favorite track), and Soul Survivor. Awesome. It made my weekend, and laundry more enjoyable.

Oh, and last but not least, I think I nearly aced my Dental Materials II midterm. Unless something horrible went down, I think I only missed one of forty-one questions. It's actually kinda funny how it came about. Last night when I went to bed, I wasn't super confident with my knowledge of the material, so I ended up getting up at 6:30 am to get a couple of hours more. I can't remember the last time I got up to study before an exam. I am not a morning person, so when I go to bed, I'm usually not getting up until I HAVE to.

That's all for now.

Spring Cleaning v3

If you can't tell, I'm having a pretty good time here... More photos! This time we have a selective desaturation and an abstract.

Spring Cleaning, v2

These photos didn't really work well with the last post's somewhat unintentional nature theme. The previous photos just so happened to come from the same folder (surprising, I know) and I felt that a new post was appropriate.

Spring Cleaning

So, here I am, once again, looking through my hard drive and finding some pretty cool pictures that I've taken in the past. It is an unfortunate occurrence in this digital age, that after taking hundreds of photos and then dumping them on the external disc, many get forgotten and never get to be shown the love of photoshop. Hope you enjoy a couple of old ones I found.

Summer Fair Entries

So, every year I enter some photos in the Davis County fair. I'm not going to lie, I have a love/hate relationship with the judges. They really make me angry. Last year, I entered one of my favorite photos ever, but someone gave me the wrong ribbon (first place was clearly circled on the paper). A few years ago, I didn't have a single photo place, but I somehow managed to win the special prize for the best macro photograph of the entire fair. The prize was given out by an independent judge from the Nikon corporation. For the record, one of the judges told me that he didn't like my use of depth of field in the photo. I think I'll dig around on the hard drive and find a copy of it...


In any case, that's all in the past. This year, I'm pretty proud of my entries. Here we go!

The final result for this photo was a third place. The judges said they liked my execution of the image, but that the cropping wasn't tight enough. They wished I had cut and inch or so off the right side so that the half leaf wasn't there to detract from the composition of the picture. Very sound advice, if you ask me.


This photo did not place. I was told that the focus wasn't sharp enough, and that the lighting was too flat. Also, it might have been too much of a close up.



This photo received a second place. As I predicted, the judges wanted to see a longer depth of field. One judge told me that the photo was "heavily unbalanced" with the left side of the bottle out of focus like it was. He suggested showing both sides of the bottle to add more balance to the image. I was also told, even though I think it is a cop out, that images are judged on subject recognition, and that it was difficult to determine what this photo was. What does it look like, fool?

Old photo, new tricks

So, I took this photo about three years ago. However, at the time I was completely clueless about all things having to do with photoshop and photo editing. It doesn't matter how hard you try to take *amazing* pictures straight out of the camera, because in reality no matter how good your photo is, you can always make it look better in photoshop. I decided to revisit my old photo, and use some of the tricks I've learned to see what I could come up with.